MEET THE REAL FATHER OF MODERN EDUCATION

by Daren Jonescu ·
Published October 7, 2016
· Updated October 7, 2016

[Egerton] Ryerson from Canada, Horace Mann from Massachusetts, Sir [James] Kay Shuttleworth [sic] from England, besides many others, about this time paid visits to Prussia, and went home to recommend the adoption of much that they saw. These men were acute observers. They recognized that the Germans had learned something that was not generally known by other teachers. How are we to explain it? Had the German teachers by accident blundered upon better methods of teaching than were practised by other nations? Not so. The German methods were the natural result of the German philosophy.[i]

i. Prussophilia

Public education is the modern world’s single most subversive and tyrannical institution, not due to recent corruption, or slow deterioration, but according to its original design. If this statement still seems unnecessarily extreme, then perhaps you have not yet taken the first step toward understanding the history, sources, and seminal voices in the evolution of the totalitarian spirit’s education model. Let us take that step together right now.

In 1834, J. Orville Taylor published his influential manifesto for the development of U.S. government-controlled schooling, The District School.[ii] The book’s preface was written by New York jurist John Duer, the son of Columbia University president William Duer. Duer lavishes praise on Taylor’s detailed recommendations for what would evolve into American compulsory schooling, exhorting the reader to accept the premise that America must strive to live up to the educational standards attained in the compulsory schools instituted under the Prussian monarchy—a government, Duer asserts, “despotic in its form, but in its present administration most enlightened and paternal.”[iii] If it strikes you as odd that an early eighteenth century American jurist should be lauding the virtues of paternalistic despotism, it should. Further, and consistent with this sensibility, Duer contends that to achieve the standards of the Prussian schools, American education must be reined in with “regulations far more extensive than have yet been introduced,—a control far more enlightened and constant than has yet been exercised,—and fiscal aid far more ample than has yet been afforded.”[iv]

This “enlightened control” must focus particularly on the teachers, who, Duer asserts, must be “properly trained, and properly examined, and watched, and controlled, and, above all, properly rewarded.”[v] (Duer’s own emphasis.) That is, teachers must be trained, tested, carefully controlled, and mollified with material rewards by the government. To say the same thing another way, all parameters of purpose, teaching method, and curriculum must be strictly determined and monitored by the state, and the teachers must be compensated for the sacrifice of their judgment and initiative, i.e., of their minds. (Reread the first sentence of this paragraph if you still cannot understand why today’s teachers, the most “educated” and “professionally trained” in the history of mankind, also seem to be, on the whole, the most incompetent, lazy, intellectually incurious, and pettily selfish in the history of mankind. That is what socialism does.) Needless to say, the unstated premise here is that government education experts will necessarily know best how to establish and meet the proper, universalizable goals of childhood education, and must therefore be granted full coercive authority to develop the “extensive regulations” required to meet those goals.

And what goals did Duer and Taylor have in mind? Duer’s preface to Taylor’s book ends with this: “All that has been done in Prussia, and is about to be done in France, may be done here, and neither the patriot, the philanthropist, nor the Christian can desire more.”[vi]

Two years later, in 1836, Taylor published another important book, Digest of M. Victor Cousin’s Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia.[vii] This was a synoptic version of the major work that had influenced Taylor’s own theories in The District School, and that was having a similar effect among British compulsory schooling advocates, thanks to Sarah Austin’s English translation and enthusiastic advocacy.[viii] French intellectual Victor Cousin, a keen student of German idealism and a friend of Hegel,[ix] had presented his recommendations for public school development to the French government, in the form of a detailed study of, or rather paean to, the Prussian school system. Due to his thoroughness, his scholarly acumen, and his personal connections to some of the giants of German philosophy, his work became the go-to reference point for Western paternalists seeking to overturn traditional family- and church-based moral development in favor of state child-rearing.

As is typical when looking back to the early moments in the history of a devolutionary process, reading Cousin’s study today, nearly two centuries after his work effectively torpedoed the Western liberal ship of state, is an exercise in imaginative paradigm-shifting. We must retrain our vision, through intellectual restorations of historical context, to perceive what is outrageous and tyrannical in Cousin’s boring litany of arcane details about the Prussian schools. In other words, having now far exceeded all the controlling urges and authoritarian impositions espoused so soberly by the scholarly Cousin, we must not so much read his work as struggle to experience its force as his contemporaries must have experienced it, by peeling away the layers of subsequent societal deterioration to reveal what now appears all too commonplace as startling once more, to perceive the stone age of progressivism’s advance as the cutting edge that it once was, and to feel his now quaintly schoolma’amish proposals as the radical thrust they would have represented in their time.

Hence it may be with initial bemusement that today’s progressivism-overloaded reader encounters Cousin’s enthusiastic praise of the near-perfections of the Prussian system’s approach to centralized control, in which the Christian churches (particularly the Lutheran) are appealed to as allies in the dissemination of universal schooling, and allowed to pursue this education somewhat according to their own lights, though with the guiding hand of the central planners being applied judiciously to ensure that the proper aims of the system are being adhered to. Those aims, which of course include government-regulated teacher training, age-graded classes, a social utility-based vetting and ranking process, and the rest of the rudiments of public schooling, are neatly summarized in this charming statement of intent:

We have abundant proof that the well-being of an individual, like that of a people, is nowise secured by extraordinary intellectual powers or very refined civilization. The true happiness of an individual, as of a people, is founded on strict morality, self-government, humility, and moderation; on the willing performance of all duties to God, his superiors, and his neighbors.[x]

Intellectual development may be given its due, but only once the child has been trained to submit to his duty. That is, the child’s will is to be bent to the service of “God” and “his neighbors” without reference to any guiding intellectual principles or understanding apart from the need for obedience itself. What this means, in practice, is that submission to authority as such, rather than to truth, is to be the essence of moral training. In other words, “God” and “his neighbors” are convenient rhetorical bookends for the real focus of the child’s moral duty: “his superiors.” Cousin’s use of the term “self-government” must be understood in this light; “self-government” and “moderation” here refer primarily to the citizen’s humility before his superiors, which is to say his deference to authority and his overriding willingness to keep to his proper place.

Cousin’s hope in recommending the Prussian system to his own nation’s leaders was to achieve in France the great dream of nineteenth century state schooling advocates everywhere, namely compulsoriness, i.e., the force of law to determine the manner of raising all children within and for the nation, rather than the mere provision of education for the poor, which is sometimes falsely cited today as the goal of the early education reformers. Toward this end, Cousin promoted an incrementalism which would exploit educational conditions already existing in France as an opportunity to introduce new laws making those very conditions mandatory. This might seem to be a superfluous and unjustified imposition of state coercion, since on his own account local municipalities and churches were already doing what was supposedly needed; but the superimposition of laws precisely in such areas is useful, as Cousin teaches his powerful readers, in that it will effectively but almost painlessly turn the legislative ratchet ever closer to the dream of universal compulsion schooling, which Cousin admits is not yet “rooted in the habits and the mind” of France.[xi] For this reason, the primary school laws he recommends must be “provisional and not definitive law,” and “must of necessity be re-constructed at the end of ten years.”[xii]

In other words, anything people are doing freely, but which seems consistent with the aspirations of compulsory schooling advocates, should immediately be made mandatory. Henceforward, the state will be able to claim this social function—originally achieved voluntarily by free men—as the product of its legislation, thereby entrenching the fallacious principle that government was always essential to any general provision of education, which in turn will strengthen the public case for further legislation.

This incrementalism—the common strategy of progressives up to the present day—provides the simple answer to those who seek to pooh-pooh claims that these “reformers” were driven by authoritarian impulses by arguing that the policies they actually implemented often seem so moderate compared to the degraded schools of today. Put simply, these reformers were seeking to revolutionize their societies from within, and therefore had no choice but to work within the accepted social structures and public opinion of their time. Deterioration is gradual; so is active destruction, when undertaken through non-violent means.

Horace Mann, “the Father of the Common School Movement,” was one of many who sought to import the Prussian model to his nation. In practical fact, he was “merely” the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (1837), established a version of universal Prussian schooling in his state,[xiii] and encouraged the coercive homogenization of teachers and textbooks[xiv]—achievements which might almost appear a step in the right direction to Americans, when seen from today’s perspective of the national Common Core standards and the orchestrated breakdown of civil society by means of compulsory schooling. Looked at in the light of the world in which Mann operated, however, his practical achievements must be understood as having paved the way toward subsequent, more extreme corruptions of the purpose and methods of education. And it is important to note that many of the subsequent corruptions were in part products of Mann’s early advocacy, though he was unable to achieve them fully all at once, due to the resistance of a citizenry that still valued its freedom: compulsory schooling conceived as a means to forced social reformation, and learning redefined as the coercive regimentation of the mind in preparation for a life of social submission.

“Few men,” Mann wrote, “have battles to fight, or senates to persuade, or kingdoms to rule; but all have a spirit to be controlled, and to be brought into subjection to the social and divine law.”[xv] “Subjection to the social law” may be an acceptable goal as an expression of the aims of education in general. As a description of the aims of government-mandated schooling, only our lifelong universal habituation to state social manipulation could prevent us from seeing its dangerous implications.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a prominent Methodist minister and politician, Egerton Ryerson, led the movement for universal “free schools.” He traveled Europe in search of examples of government schooling to bring to Canada, and also frequently cited the New York and Massachusetts systems—Taylor’s and Mann’s Prussia-inspired efforts—as desirable goals for Upper Canada (comprising most of what is now southern Ontario).[xvi] The major reforms he instigated during the 1840s included government-supervised teacher training facilities, government textbook authorization and production, and of course the strengthening of the “free schools” movement itself.[xvii]

I have only noted a few examples to establish a pattern, although these examples represent some of the most influential education reformers in the histories of their respective nations. Others have developed more comprehensive accounts of the many players involved in this global dissemination of Prussia’s educational philosophy.[xviii] The key point for our purposes is that the theme of emulating the methods, and matching the achievements, of the Prussian compulsory school system—the modern West’s first—predominates throughout nineteenth century European and North American public school advocacy. The major players in the evolution of the early public schools toward fully regulated compulsory public education all studied the Prussian system—established in law during the mid-1700s but “perfected” in practice and principle in the aftermath of the Napoleonic occupation—and vehemently advocated its adoption at home. Running through the various iterations of this global advocacy of Prussian schooling, one notices a common proviso with which the praise of this system is almost invariably prefaced, as for example by Taylor: “Many parts of this system of public instruction are not adapted to the spirit of the American people, nor to their form of civil government. Yet from the results of this great experiment in giving the whole people that kind and degree of instruction which they need, some of the most useful and practical lessons may be obtained.”[xix]

“Yet….” This proviso, in all its variations, amounts to this: “The Prussian school model was developed under an authoritarian regime, by supporters and bureaucrats of that regime, and for the express purpose of subduing and homogenizing a population by forcing everyone through a uniform moral training system with the welfare of the state (i.e., the ruling class) as its ultimate aim—but there is no reason to fear that adopting such a system here at home should lead to any loss of freedom or entail any weakening of moral independence among our citizens.”

I leave it to others to judge whether the international proponents of this view were cynical and disingenuous or merely disastrously naïve. It seems noteworthy, however, that the document which inspired so much of the general enthusiasm for the Prussian model throughout Europe, Britain, and North America, Cousin’s Report, was, to put it politely, somewhat deceptive.

Though this may not be discussed in standard accounts of his Report, the systematic structure and administrative methods he claims to have observed in Prussia, and which form the basis of his recommendations for applying the same system in France, never existed. In a recent work on the Prussian influence on British education, David Phillips explains that what Cousin actually outlined was the contents of a proposed law that was never enacted; and yet Cousin—who would have to have known this, given his intimacy with Prussian intellectuals and his time spent observing Prussian schools themselves—explicitly and repeatedly portrayed these contents as established educational practice, even though his book was published many years after the draft bill he was describing had been shelved.[xx]

Furthermore, Phillips observes that even in its own time “the renowned German educationist Adolf Diesterweg noted inaccuracies in Cousin’s report and felt that he ‘perceived only the brighter side of the German system.’”[xxi] This latter shortcoming, the rose-colored glasses worn when viewing the Prussian model, remained a consistent trend throughout subsequent compulsory school advocacy of the period. “Pollyanna” does not begin to describe the tone of Mann’s, Taylor’s, or Ryerson’s accounts of daily life in the Prussian schools, for example. One word that does begin to describe their accounts, on the other hand, is “messianic.” These men were on a sacred mission, as they saw it, to transform their societies in the name of Righteousness. In Mann’s words:

If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all the toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of education.… The common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man.[xxii]

Nothing would stand in their way—no law, no public sentiment, no personal humility, and certainly no peccadilloes about the dangers of adopting the methods and social structures of a despotic regime. Messianic men, caught in the fever of social change, are just the sort of men likely to “perceive only the brighter side of the German system.” In other words, like Cousin, they saw what they wished to see in Prussia, and only that. (As we shall see in a subsequent chapter, this “end justifies the means” school of nineteenth century educational messianism was child’s play compared to what was coming in the twentieth.)

What exactly did all of this Prussophilia indicate? What did it entail for the growth of modern public education? The answers may be found through an examination of the Prussian model itself. But just as Taylor, Cousin, Ryerson, or any other reform-minded man, must be judged not only according to his practical accomplishments, which are always contingent upon many factors beyond his control, but also, and perhaps primarily, according to his stated intentions, so the Prussian schools as they existed in practice tell us only a partial story. (In this sense, Cousin’s approach, though dishonest, was not entirely wrong.) The surest way to grasp the essence of the Prussian establishment at whose feet Western education reformers were groveling is to examine the man who, above all others, defined the goals and spirit of the post-occupation Prussian compulsory school apparatus. For the man in question was no busybody or intellectual lightweight with a bureaucratic powermonger’s personal agenda. Rather, he was one of the most influential of all German philosophers, one of the major transitional figures in the development of German idealism, and the thinker most commonly and correctly associated with the nationalistic fervor for the German fatherland that has led that nation down the path to its ugliest excesses: Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

The chief forerunner of German idealism, Immanuel Kant, was almost a caricature of the oddball professor, with his strange habits, idiosyncratic self-discipline, and strict adherence to a routine in which deviations seem to have been perceived as cheating, while idealism’s full bloom, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was the prototype of the celebrity lecturer, a kind of academic Paganini, composing works that he alone could play properly, demanding that all subsequent knowledge be sought through him, and that all previous ideas be understood as mere precursors to himself. Through all its developments, however, at the core of German idealism is its implicit rejection of the presupposition—the basis of most prior Western thought—that philosophy must reason from everyday experience to its underlying causes, in favor of the premise that philosophy must in effect explainaway that experience, which the idealists accomplished first by cutting human reason off from the so-called “external world,” and later by reducing that world to so much sawdust on the floor of the creative philosopher’s workshop.

It is extremely noteworthy that this was history’s first major philosophical movement to be conceived largely within and for the ivory tower. The development of idealism was essentially a discussion among professors, paid scholars, many of whom knew one another personally, and whose primary occupation was as university lecturers. This was something new. These thinkers were not simply men who philosophized. They were professional philosophers, theoretical salesmen if you will. Wowing the audience, overwhelming the world with dizzying flights of novelty, was part of their stock in trade. German idealism—a movement sprung from the problem produced by Kant’s insuperable boundary separating human reason from the world “in itself,” and resolved in Hegel’s ingenious reduction of the world to himself—gave birth to the modern idea of the intellectual who not only fails to explain life as we experience it, but proudly proclaims himself to be above such naïve concerns as compatibility with experience, preferring instead to be its creator or regulator.

George Santayana summarizes the movement similarly:

German Idealism, when we study it as a product of its own age and country, is a most engaging phenomenon; it is full of afflatus, sweep, and deep searchings of the heart; but it is essentially romantic and egotistical, and all in it that is not soliloquy is mere system-making and sophistry. Therefore when it is taught by unromantic people ex cathedra, in stentorian tones, and represented as the rational foundation of science and religion, with neither of which it has any honest sympathy, it becomes positively odious—one of the worst impostures and blights to which a youthful imagination could be subjected.[xxiii]

One great social effect of this world-changing philosophical movement was that it engendered the peculiar modern subspecies that we might call “experts without portfolio,” men whose claim to the non-academic public’s ear is based on little more than their socially respected position as professional intellectuals and their generally acknowledged (and frequently self-proclaimed) brilliance, and who are therefore permitted to influence practical societal decision-making processes without offering a justification of their proposals grounded in practical reality, or tested against their human implications. By sheer dint of their audacity in claiming to have uncovered ultimate truths of which no previous thinkers—let alone ordinary Germans—had even begun to conceive, the idealists struck (and still strike) intellectual terror and awe into the hearts of otherwise reasonable human beings. From their lofty perch, they have effectively ruled the academy—and hence, in most essential ways, the modern world—for two hundred years.

No such public intellectual has ever cashed in his “great thinker” chips in the name of a specific practical outcome more effectively than Fichte, the most influential idealist philosopher spanning the historical moment between Kant, his teacher, and Hegel, his spiritual offspring. Part soothsayer, part metaphysical poet, part nationalist rabble-rouser, Fichte retrenched Kantianism as a specifically German movement, in opposition to Kant’s own instinct for cosmopolitanism. In the process, he also reconfigured idealist social policy, dispensing with the one-world musings of Kant’s Perpetual Peace in deference to authoritarian manipulation of the population in the name of creating a national collectivist dream world. Where his teacher had enjoined men to treat others as ends in themselves, and never as means to one’s own ends, Fichte sought to dissolve all men, and all individual ends, into the nation, such that the collective itself would be the only end, and all men the mere means. Such was the force of his rhetoric along these lines that the late eighteenth century liberal ripples within German intellectual life were quickly swept away in a wave of nationalistic statism.

Case in point: Wilhelm von Humboldt—thinker, diplomat, man of letters, and founder of the University of Berlin (1810), which became the spiritual home of German idealism. Humboldt won notice and praise from John Stuart Mill as an advocate of liberty. His book, The Sphere and Duties of Government[xxiv]—written in 1791, but only published posthumously in 1852—seeks to define the terms upon which the government may properly claim a role in the life of a people. This work includes an examination of the case for a national education system. Considering the prospects for modern spiritual development, and whether it requires any kind of state-directed moral training, he argues:

[M]en have now arrived at a far higher pitch of civilization, beyond which it seems they cannot aspire to still loftier heights save through the development of individuals; and hence it is to be inferred that all institutions which act in any way to obstruct or thwart this development, and compress men together into vast uniform masses, are now far more hurtful than in earlier ages of the world.[xxv]

To “compress men together into vast uniform masses” is about as pithy a description of the nature of government education as can be conceived. To those among his German readers who suppose that national education is the only way to ensure the desirable harmony of interests between the private man and his sense of citizenship, Humboldt objects:

The happiest result must follow, it is true, when the relations of man and citizen coincide as far as possible but this coincidence is only to be realized when those of the citizen presuppose so few distinct peculiarities that the man may preserve his natural form without any sacrifice [of self to state]; and it is to the expediency of securing this perfect harmony between the requirements of man and citizen that all the ideas I have in view in this inquiry directly converge. For, although the immediately hurtful consequences of such a misrelation as that to which we have referred would be removed when the citizens of a State were expressly trained up with a view to their political character, still the very object would be sacrificed which the association of human beings in a community was designed to secure. Whence I conclude, that the freest development of human nature, directed as little as possible to ulterior civil relations, should always be regarded as paramount in importance with respect to the culture of man in society. He who has been thus freely developed should then attach himself to the State.[xxvi]

In other words, coercive state indoctrination undermines the essence of citizenship—voluntary association for the improvement of life for all—and is therefore self-contradictory. Strange as it may be to our ears to hear a prominent academic and education policy expert arguing against the concept of state-directed schooling, such was the nature of modern intellectual debate before the academy demeaned itself as the handmaiden of progressive authoritarianism. Humboldt punctuates his case with a clear and unequivocal statement. Responding to the argument that a national education system is needed to strengthen the institutions of society, he notes, on the contrary, that only the developed “energies” of individual men could hope to overcome such a poor social institution as a national education system, and concludes:

For how extraordinary must those efforts be which were adequate to maintain and exalt those energies, when even from the period of youth they were bound down and enfeebled by such oppressive fetters! Now all systems of national education, inasmuch as they afford room for the manifestation of a governmental spirit, tend to impose a definite form on civic development, and therefore to repress those vital energies of the nation.[xxvii]

That is, if the improvement of modern society requires individual men of advanced spiritual development, and if such men can only survive a national education system through a monumental battle to preserve their vital energies against governmental fetters, it follows that state education is directly harmful to the only good which would have justified it, namely the strengthening of society.

We must note two weaknesses in Humboldt’s defense of educational freedom, however. First, he leaves open, at least in theory, the possibility of a national education system that does not “afford room for the manifestation of a governmental spirit.” In other words, his concern is primarily that no particular monarchical regime be granted direct control of the curriculum; a system of government education which somehow kept the particularities of this or that ruling faction at arm’s length would apparently be less repugnant to him, although he never explains how a monolithic system maintained under any broad coercive authority—no matter how theoretically detached from the rulers per se—would be immune to the corruptive effects he describes.

Secondly, his argument, though offered with passion, is ultimately utilitarian, as it emphasizes the self-defeating nature of national education programs, rather than their unjust oppressiveness as such. The utilitarian mind is always open to new considerations, however, which can transform yesterday’s ineffective notions into tomorrow’s necessary reforms—everything depends on judgments of social usefulness, rather than inviolable principle. So it was to be, unfortunately, with Wilhelm von Humboldt. (As with his admirer Mill, who died a socialist.) Put simply, Humboldt was finally persuaded, contrary to his earlier liberalism (in the classical sense), that the compression of men into vast uniform masses was more socially beneficial than the freedom of individuals to develop their energies toward the betterment of civilization. Civilization did not need to reach for loftier heights, after all, as much as it needed uniformity.

[xv] Horace Mann, Third Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Third Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1840), p. 35, 93-100.

[xvi] Putnam, Egerton Ryerson, 110ff. See also Ryerson’s own first official report to government on his plans, Egerton Ryerson, Report on a System of Public Elementary Instruction for Upper Canada (Montreal: Lovell and Gibson, 1847). This report is comprised mainly of quotations from Mann, Cousin, Taylor, et al.

[xviii] For the best outline of the details of this nineteenth century effective takeover of Western education by the original schoolma’amish busybodies, their self-serving philanthropic supporters, and their legislative enforcers—along with the warnings of their early critics, long forgotten voices in the wilderness, who saw where all of this was tending—I refer you to Gatto’s Underground History of American Education.

[xix] Taylor, Digest, 9. And just what kind and degree of education does a “whole people” need? Don’t you worry about that; your government apparently knows the answer.